How is the landing zone pipeline different from the ship pipeline? Are the benefits of the improved ship pipeline process making their way into the landing zone pipeline? Is there even a pipeline for landing zones or are you waiting for procedural planet technology to finish before resuming major work on landing locations on planets?asked by Lock Ostrie

[Special Episode with answers from Erin Roberts]I think what you are asking here is ... when you say "the landing zone pipeline" that's our environment pipeline and yes, a lot of the ways we are building ships in terms of the way we do stuff, in terms of ... we come up with, say on the ship pipeline once we have nailed down what RSI looks like or so forth, then we have a lot of stuff we can use then ... that we can reuse that makes us be able to create the ships faster. And it really helps with the larger cap ships in the game because we've always got these huge spaces to create.On the landing zones, so absolutely. The way Ian Leyland, who's our ... is the Art Director in charge of Environments, he works out the UK office ... the whole way the pipeline is put together is in a very modular fashion but in a way that doesn't look repetitive. And so we are building these environments so they can be reused all over the place. So although right now you're seeing one or two things in terms of the PU, as we go forward we're going to be able to drop very complex and large, detailed areas in the game. Internal areas, inside space stations, on planets, and just everywhere you go and so forth. And that's the sort of stuff we'll be dropping into the game this year and a lot of that ... more stuff will be coming out.And we're already doing that on the Squadron 42 levels. Right now we have huge FPS levels in Squadron 42 using the basic, smallest kind of stuff. But yes that's what's going to happen.Now the procedural stuff as you mention will be coming online very soon which will tie in with the new streaming tech that we're using. And that will allow us, not only to have these environments, but also then place them within procedurally created, either planets or asteroids, and so forth. So we have ... create these huge environments and then we'll have specific areas which are created and molded to suit a purpose. So it's really cool. But then there will also be a lot of procedural stuff around it. But that stuff will be coming on this year so the answer is "Yes, what we're doing on ship stuff is going to work for environments and you're going to see that hopefully very soon".